"Public spaces belong to the public by right. And the unhoused public, who have the greatest need for public spaces, have therefore the greatest right"
Edit
I kinda made this post out of spite for the fact the most previous post in this community, whose title I quoted/copied, was getting so many downvotes... At the time I posted this, the previous post had about a 30% downvote rate, and it really, really made me mad.
I am relieved tho to see people in the comments here who have real, actual empathy for their fellow humans. Thank you for contributing here.
It blows my mind how normalized it is to hate on those who are struggling. Especially in 20fucking23 when so many of us now are on the verge of it ourselves. Let's be better, everyone - to everyone. I beg you.
692
Comments174
Everyone is ok with homeless in tents till they set up shop in your street
If someone sets up a spot to sleep and keep their stuff close to your house, try talking to them like a person. I live in the City, so there are plenty of people I see all the time. Sometimes they ask for help, sometimes we just talk. I help when I can, but I also say no when I can’t. I stand outside and talk to some of the struggling people close to me for a while sometimes. They’re just people
We need more of this right here in the world. Thank you for being an empathetic and decent human.
The healthy homeless people struggling in my city get plenty of aid. The ones you find camping out are the ones who choose to be homeless, and the ones too mentally ill to seek help. But since we've become so sensitive, we just let them sleep outside instead of forcing them into programs. Until we accept that the mentally ill homeless who refuse aid need to be picked up and forced into it, things will never change.
I don't mind the homeless through no fault of their own camping on my street. But I've seen plenty of drugged out mofos camping in front of or near my work I wouldn't want anywhere near my house or those of my neighbors who have kids. I'm talking about the mofos who take apart cars and bikes and whatever else and then just leave everything when they move on. The mofos with piles of garbage that attract rats bigger than cats.
Ah yes, because everyone in their right minds aspire to addictions.
i doubt many people want to be addicts but they succumb to it all the same. regardless it doesnt excuse living like described above and i dont blame people for not wanting to be near described above.
Again, go spend a night in a shelter. Then say what you said.
or... i dont want someones kid to get a bbp from a dirty needle or whatever because they played in garbage left behind. im describing things ive seen with my own eyes. shelters do have their own problems as well. being homeless isnt easy. there are homeless people who dont leave vehicles stripped, needles everywhere, mounds of garbage, and burnt rvs behind. i dont mind those people being around, and i believe some are.
im empathetic to the plight of the homeless, however that doesnt give them free reign over the rest of society. id love to see the nation, as a whole, because cities like new york san fran la seattle ect cant fix it on their own. id love to see expanded mental health coverage and better treatment for inpatient care. id love to see better access and more rehabilitation facilities. also id love to see the people who desperately need those services to take up the offer when and where its available which largely doesnt happen.
So what are you doing to help expedite anything, other than encouraging criminalization of despair?
yeah not wanting to live or work near this makes me a bad person.
See, this is part of the issue. Too many people recognize the problems, but as soon as any solutions to those problems inconvenience them, any empathy for those problems then goes right out the window....
I remember this guy in my city set up fake signs for the opening of a new homeless shelter in one of the wealthier and more liberal neighbourhoods in the city, where the "provide for the homeless!" Crowd tend to live.
The neighborhood was up in arms at the idea of the shelter getting set up in THEIR neighborhood. There's a video about it around somewhere.
You know what's worse than living near the homeless? Being homeless. You're only a few paychecks away from homelessness yourself.
Maybe address that problem in a more direct way than letting tent cities be the solution? Here's a crazy idea: actually provide housing. Treat mental illness and substance abuse. Provide training and job assistance. Create an actual social safety net.
I want both. I want to have housing-first approaches for the homeless, and I want homeless people to stop being harassed by police, government, and other people. If society has failed someone to the point of homelessness, they have a right to public spaces for survival.
A few paychecks?
Look at rockSlayer Moneybags over here
Jokes aside: I was homeless for 8 years, it really fucking sucked but I'd say that the worst part wasn't trying to stay warm when it was below freezing or trying to stay dry in the rain, it was being treated as less than human simply because I was worse off than other people.
Even after I got a job and started building my life back up, when people realized that I was homeless they would immediately become either cold or hostile
It's so fucked up how badly homeless people are treated in this country. I do what I can in my community, but it's about time I find my local mutual aid group to be real help. Glad you managed to get back on your feet! If you don't mind me asking, what was the situation and how did you build back?
Bit of a long story here so I'll break it into 3 big parts really.
I won't be using names because of privacy reasons, and I'll be scant on some details for the same reason.
For timeframe the events here start basically in 2009. Specifics will also be fuzzy from this point, again due to privacy.
⚠️Trigger warnings will appear for each section but include: Drug and alcohol abuse, miscarriage, death, suicide.⚠️
::: spoiler How I became homeless (short version) (Trigger warning: Drug and physical abuse)
I ended becoming homeless at 16 primarily due to my abusive father's struggles with addiction (I won't go into more detail here but there's a lot there including him cooking meth and violence) and due to him we (him, my mom, my brother, my sister, and I) lost our home and became homeless.
In the lead to when we knew we were going to lose our home I asked around to see if I could stay with anyone until I got back on my feet. All my relatives said no (we'll come back to this later) and unfortunately none of my friends could let me stay for long.
I had a boyfriend and girlfriend at the time but the boyfriend's family (who didn't know we were dating) wouldn't let me stay for an unknown amount of time due to personal reasons. And the girlfriend's family wouldn't let a boy move in with them and their daughter.
When everything went down and we lost everything, all of my friend's families I had asked no longer would let me stay with them as word got out why we lost everything.
So I surfed benches, slept at my highschool, occasionally people would let me stay for a couple days (after the dust settled), and did a lot of "camping" in local parks. I also struggled to stay sober as at this point I had quit drinking only a couple months before I turned 16 (I started at 12).
Not so fun fact: This time span included my first experiences with police brutality, for sleeping on benchs. Getting woken up by a taser isn't fun.
:::
::: spoiler My first plan for fixing my homelessness falling through (Trigger warning: Miscarriage, alcohol abuse, suicide, and death)
So this is a few years after everything went down. I was still dating the same boyfriend and girlfriend at this time. We had all come to the conclusion that we loved each other and wanted to spend the rest of our lives together. We just all had to properly get our feet under us due to employment being pretty sparse even then locally and rent being really bloody high.
The boyfriend had eventually gotten a good paying job. But was still living with his parents.
The girlfriend was a full time student so working was really hard as well. She was also living
The girlfriend ended up getting pregnant (like 2013) and having a miscarriage (almost 5 months later) which we all took really poorly. Her especially as her parents were incredibly unsupportive.
She started doing bad enough in school there was talk about loosing her financial support.
Her parents then told her she had 30 days to move out as they had sold the house.
She killed herself 21 days later.
I was working at a bar at the time and I fell off the wagon and started drinking again. The boyfriend did as well.
He died a few days later after getting drunk and driving his car into a tree going way over the speed limit.
I fell apart and started drinking profusely.
The plan of living with them has fallen apart.
:::
::: spoiler Eventually getting on my feet. (Trigger warning: abuse of the emotional kind, though I'm very light on details)
After a few months of being an emotional wreck due to the previous section, a relative of mine (my grandma, long story why I no longer consider her family) saw me holding a sign on the side of the road.
She asked if I had a job, I did.
She asked if I had a place to stay, I had a car by this point.
She asked me if I needed a better place to stay. I said yes.
I think the only reason she stopped was because one of her church friends was in the car with her. She's not typical nice, which will become more apparent.
After getting to her place is when she laid the ground rules. I was not allowed to come up to the house for anything other than an emergency.
I could not use her bathroom, her shower, her washer and dryer, her dishwasher, or her power.
I was not to be seen by her or her neighbors at all.
I was fine with this if it meant I could have a consistent place to park and an address I could put down on applications for better jobs.
Eventually though one of her neighbors saw me bathing in the creek behind my grandma's house and they walked over to talk to me.
Turns out grandma was telling everyone I was staying in her spare bedroom and not my car on the back of her property behind the barn.
The next day she, "Felt God's blessing that I could come up [to her house] to use some of the facilities in her home, if I asked first."
This continued for a couple years before I got a much better paying job and was able to get an apartment for myself after about 6 months of working the new job.
I also quit drinking a few years after that but that's a tale for another time.
:::
TLDR: A relative (my grandma) let me eventually (after years of being homeless) stay in the back part of her large property (as long as I wasn't seen by her) and use her address for applications which allowed me to get a better job and back on my feet.
In case no one in your family has said anything, I'm proud of you for coming back from all of that. Not many people are able to come back from that almost entirely by themselves.
After a bout of homelessness myself as a teenager, and then several years later working for a shelter, this is an all too common and tragic story...
Speak for yourself. The owner class has long gaslighted everyone that greed and shit behavior is the default for humanity.
I'm not sure if I'm owner class since I live in a rented apartment but I dislike all the needles and feeling unsafe just going in and out of my apartment. Doubly so for my wife who gets harassed more than I do. So much so that she's afraid to go anywhere.
It just sucks. Dunno if it counts as shit behaviour but I wish they wouldn't camp there.
i dont mind letting people use public areas as a place to stay for the night. but its not just a place to stay for them. its a place to do drugs, shit and piss all over the place, steal from and harrass and assault everyone around them, and let their trash pile up and attract pests. its a huge problem where i am and these people are fucking terrifying to be around. like, i dont want to be inhumane to anyone but where do we draw the line?
There does seem to be way fewer public toilets around these days. We closed them (or at least lock them overnight) because people were doing drugs and having sex in them.
So now they do those things outside, and I have to piss in the bushes when I'm out for a walk.
The trouble with the homeless is that they need to be around the normal people in order to survive and get money for food and drugs, but the normal people want them as far away as possible.
If we were rational about this, we'd set up communes where people would be fed, housed and clothed for free, given all the drugs they want, and help if they want to stop living like that. It would be way cheaper for society to deal with all in one place like that, drugs aren't really expensive to make, and the rest of us can go to their town centre without a psychotic toothless crackhead screaming at them for money. But we're not rational, and likely never will be. This isn't Star Trek, and the idea of somebody else getting something for nothing seems to fill about half the population with a frothing rage.
So basically prisons but with free drugs
I was thinking more like those old people towns, but where it's acceptable to smoke spice all day and sit there dribbling into your own lap and aggressively screaming at each other.
Maybe if the drugs were free, they wouldn't need all that aggro.
Or, maybe just give them a place to live without segragating them? Why are you talking about people like they are fundamentally broken for being homeless?
I havent seen that episode, but it is kind of an issue how whenever you try to put a bunch of poor/homeless people together, others start to avoid that area and jobs/services become scarce.
I like the idea of "mixed income housing". Apartment buildings with a mix of free, cheap, and regular priced units. The standard units would probably be valued a bit lower than the normal market price, giving mid-income people an incentive to live there, and the homeless people who move in get to be part of a normal-ish community.
100 homeless people stuck in one place can cause a lot of chaos, but a small small group here and there seems a lot more manageable.
their public toilet is the bathroom where i work im pretty sure. but they also use our parking garage and just kind of wherever around their camps.
Imo we draw the line when someone who wants to be housed is threatened with being houseless and provide them with housing. Providing housing first is also the best way to deal with all the issues connected to being houseless like drug use, trauma from violence, mental health issues, etc
Imo the line has been crossed long ago and gets crossed every day and its important to keep in mind when trying to find solutions that are more like band aids on a broken system.
yeah im not advocating to kill them all or arrest them all or anything. i dont have the answers. but its pretty much weekly that someone at my job is assaulted or cars are broken into daily or a kid finds a dirty needle or so on. and most of these people seem like they dont want help. they really do revel in being awful it seems. they steal and harrass us gleefully without a look of remorse in their eyes so idk.
i think if you had to deal with these people on a daily basis you would have a different opinion about them.
"These people" should be provided with a safe home to sleep in, that's the solution. Maybe if you had to deal with long-term homelessness firsthand, you'd have a different opinion about them. Maybe you wouldn't look at them and see a "pest" anymore, but a struggling person who's been failed by the system.
never said they were pests or not human or that i dont sympathize with their plight. just that something needs to be done for them so they dont have to camp on the streets
It's always interesting to me how no one ever complains or overgeneralizes about people who are criminals, drug addicts, and/or severely mentally ill who live in houses. There are news stories daily about people losing their shit on airplanes. Every retail store and restaurant I've ever worked in had some kind of ongoing bathroom and/or dressing room issues where people can't be bothered to utilize toilets or put their menstrual products or kids' diapers in garbage cans. I've dated several people who were physically abusive to me and the people they dated before and after me. Yet, they are now parents with careers and, you guessed it, a mortgage or rent bill. I've also been around plenty of people who are either "functionally" mentally ill, meaning they are raging narcissists who don't hesitate to harm others in any way possible as long as they get what they want, or who are just raging fucking assholes, like the twenty something year old girls at my college who are so invested in being at the top of their class and kissing the professors asses that they put effort into sabotaging other students and talking shit about everyone around them.
Bit I don't hear anyone generalizing every single college student as being a self-obsessed sociopath just because there's a subset of them that are bitches. I don't hear anyone overgeneralizing every blue collar worker as being immature woman beaters with anger issues just because there's a subset of them who are like that. And you get my point.
In addition, I think dealing with the presence of unhoused people and their camps is far less impactful for me at least. Ok, so downtown is dirty and dangerous. Wtf else is new? My college campus has had a problem recently with fake uber drivers picking up female students and assaulting them. Somehow, I don't think any of the drivers were homeless. But I guess we should all stereotype uber drivers now as violent perverts, and outlaw all rideshare companies from the area. So it doesn't really matter whether you're downtown or near some camp or what have you. Crime is everywhere, and unhoused people are no different than the average population.
And what about car camping? I never hear anyone complaining about people who live in their cars being violent or dirty or crazy? If all unhoused people were all of those things, shouldn't car campers be a huge problem? Especially when they're not limited to doing all their crime in urban areas and can drive to wherever they want?
ive worked in retail for 10 years. this job is the first job ive had where there are drug addicted homeless people camped all around it. its different then your average karen or douchebag kyle. and yes ik that bathrooms are perpetually disgusting. but this is not like that. its a special kind of fucked up idk.
You don't want to be inhumane... but everything you just described previous to that is basically dehumanizing an entire segment of population...
no its just the reality of the situation. youd say the same thing if you lived and worked around them like i do.
I disagree... public space is our space. No one's need is greater than anyone else's. The homeless need help, the pubic space that we use to get to the store, play with our children, buff highway noise is not the place to get that. Now, I'm not saying financially penalizing or jailing them are the only alternatives but safe camping/RV spots with access to access social services, Wi-Fi, gather for ac/heater, etc seems like a better approach.
I'd rather we just give them housing and a support network to prevent homelessness in the first place. Until then, homeless people have a right to access third spaces for as long as they don't have a living space.
Where I live housing is provided but some homeless people are so because they trash the apartments or they can't or won't respect very basic rules of not constantly causing a disturbance and the like. Addiction is big part of that. There's lots of programs and services for that too but can't really force people to use those services.
You can do a lot by offering help but some still refuse it. In that case I feel like it's fair to make sure they're not a disturbance to other people just wanting to go about their day.
Most people don't choose to be homeless. If, and this is highly unlikely, homelessness in your area is due primarily to addiction, then the solution is not "usher them out of sight". Supervised injection sites should be provided, so those people taking drugs can do so safely under medical supervision. If someone is homeless due to drugs, then they should also be able to live in third places without being harassed. The city becomes responsible for making sure that those homeless people can discard of their trash properly and have needle drops to make sure needles stay off the ground.
You can look into homeless in Finland but it sure seems like homelessness is primarily caused by addiction (usually alcohol).
Nobody has the right to harass others and make them have to fear just walking in public. Nobody has the right to do drugs and leave their dirty needless around other people. Homeless are no different. They have no right to subject others to that just as we don't have the right to subject them to such conditions.
We should absolutely do everything we can to help them but being homeless or addict isn't a pass to harass anyone. The city and the state has the responsibility to make sure everyone can live without harassment and sometimes that includes making sure homeless people don't just camp wherever to harass others.
I mean for fuck's sake, there's helping and being understanding and there's seeing them harass my wife, attacking people and making life hell for others.
It sounds to me like your definition of harassment in this case "existing in public while homeless".
There's been two attempted rapes and an assault and robbery so far. I'd consider that a bit beyond "existing in public space".
It's gotten so bad that especially women are afraid to visit or have moved away. They get the worst of it, with constant verbal abuse and sexual harassment, not to mention the fear about rape.
It's sick that some people instead of listening try to brush these things off just because the perpetrators are homeless. As if that made attempted rape somehow less bad.
need != convenience
Make it happen then. All those things you'd like to see instead of the unhoused finding shelter are great. But the hypothetical "better" solution is meaningless until it's implemented. Until then, decriminalize survival like the pic says.
Seattle is working through it's shit albeit slowly and with many mistakes. Mental health funding was the ballot just recently, our homeless authority CEO was basically fired for incompetence, small homes and apartments available with more on the way, RV/camp sites are growing, anti-open use law is still in the works, camp removal is stalled due to too ambiguous definitions of "blocking". I live and work in the city and I'll be the first to vote on sensible laws and bonds. What I find no longer tolerable is bottomless unquestioned empathy.
Seattle is working through it's shit albeit slowly and with many mistakes. Mental health funding was the ballot just recently, our homeless authority CEO was basically fired for incompetence, small homes and apartments available with more on the way, RV/camp sites are growing, anti-open use law is still in the works, camp removal is stalled due to too ambiguous definitions of "blocking". I live and work in the city and I'll be the first to vote on sensible laws and bonds. What I find no longer tolerable is bottomless unquestioned empathy.
If you agree with this, you've never seen public spaces taken over by homeless.
Perhaps it would make us want to... help them better.
It does, but helping is not giving them free reign over public spaces.
I agree. But by allowing them to be in public spaces we're giving some squeak to an otherwise unnoticed wheel. Maybe then it actually gets the grease it needs.
Also... would you want to live in a tent in the park? Do you think they want that? Nobody wants to live their life that way. These are people without anywhere to go. Should they sleep in dumpsters just so we don't have to look at them?
Yeah! Let's kick them out of public spaces... wait a minute.
I'm all for helping but you can't expect people to tolerate being threatened, feeling unsafe, people trashing or stealing others' property, littering places with human feces and needles...
Nobody should have to tolerate that. Offer help yes but you can't expect anyone to put up with that. Not the homeless or those with homes.
A friend of mine once said "no one healthy wakes up one day and decides to try heroin, just for fun."
That really stuck with me. There are many reasons why people use substances, and there are many reasons why people may refuse help. This doesn't make them less than. You, as an outsider, have no knowledge or understanding of the circumstances that lead them to where they now are.
Being in perpetual debilitating pain from botched operations, wounds sustained during battle or plain accidents are not a choice. Neither is having any number of diseases that leaves you in said chronic pain.
The healthcare system is nothing but an administrative nightmare in many places, and it can be nigh impossible to get the help needed to recover to a functional life depending on where you live.
You've clearly never lived with any sort of chronic pain condition. I've only ever gotten fentanyl once - in the hospital, with a doctor's hand inside my stomach. You also clearly have no idea how hard it is to rebuild a normal life after several surgeries that don't end well.
I'd be dead or in the streets too except I happen to live somewhere halfway decent, and even then I barely get by on a monthly script. Do you have any idea how it feels when your insides are filled with cysts? Ever had your intestines on the outside of your body involuntarily? How about breaking open your nose bone to get even more cysts out?
You feel like people unlucky enough to go through things like that should just suck it up for their remaining years? It's just a little pain, right?
Those "paragraphs" has been the past 6 years of my life. My son was 3 when I got sick, and he's only ever seen me lie in bed or hobble around awkwardly.
I'm not manufacturing anything, I'm living it.
I'm very sorry for your loss.
Those are the folks who need it most
this is entirely valid. and our kids deserve to walk to school without getting stabbed by the needles all over the place.
I think a balance needs to be found and the unhoused communities need to police their own residents; Seattle has had success with this and the tiny housing communities it's established - they give people an address to start seeking assistance for their issues, and don't tolerate violence and dangerous behaviors like leaving needles everywhere.
I don't understand the appeal of going onto the internet just to lie about a group of people who have done nothing to harm you.
I used to live in next to a homeless encampment. I used to walk by it every single day for 2 years. I have never ONCE seen a needle on the ground, day or night. You know what I did see a bunch of? People claiming that there were needles everywhere, without a single shred of evidence whatsoever.
I've lived in Northeast Seattle (near 125th) and South Seattle (othello) - seen needles at the Van Asselt community center when taking my kid to daycare. The staff had to sweep the park and wading pool daily. In Lake City, all around the Lake City mini park and what's now the skate park.
I'm an advocate for finding solutions but to disregard the reality faced by parents just trying to prevent their kids getting stuck with used needles is real man.
The only way tent shelters will ever work without simply adding to the public health crisis, is to heavily legislate urban camping rules.
Make it legal to use an emergency outdoor shelter, provided it has a permit, to be renewed every week, confirms to size and placement regulations, is constructed from flame retardant materials, and (barring hazardous weather) that it's taken down every day from sunrise to sunset.
We then attach to the free permitting process, an identification check, automatic enrollment in welfare services, career counseling, etc. and immediate access to mental health and substance abuse rehabilitation.
Care for those who obey the rules and scrape up those that don't.
We can't just let people rot indefinitely, huddling half naked under a leaky plastic tarp, searching for that last good vein, and call it compassion.
Oh look! Someone MAKING SENSE!
Everything below is anecdotal, take it how you want:
The major issue you'll have with implementation of a program like this, is having the neo-liberal agenda calling it "homeless-tagging" . Which, in their eyes, equates to tagging a wild animal so it can be traced. You better believe the next high influence, Tiktok warrior would make a scathing I comment on it without research.
Like "Yeah, no shit, we tag animals to check on their well being and locations. All to necessitate the proper procedures for handling them when they need help or guidance. We tag ourselves when we get social security card or ID's, or when we take a Goddamn selfie with location settings on. The only difference is that social media and the government is handling you."
It's getting out of hand here in Los Angeles. Venice was the worst. I DARE all the commenter's in this thread that say 'it's not that bad' to take a stroll underneath an overpass here in LA proper to ask if they need help. They don't want it. Trust me. I've tried. Multiple times. I've almost got myself killed.
The suburb I live in is currently seeing a rise in homeless people just sleeping wherever they want sans tent. For example: Today I saw a dude sleeping right next to the driveway of a public plaza on the ground with a pookie in his hand. Half a block away.
There was also another dude just sleeping in our laundry room 3 weeks ago. Strung out. I asked him if he needed help and he told me to "fuck off". So I called the cops, and said "hey this guy needs medical attention. I think he's on drugs and in and out of consciousness". You know what the cops/paramedic did? They came over, woke him up, told him to leave because this wasn't his property. EMT asked him a few questions, checked him out and he was barely coherent enough to say, "I don't want your help, go away". He told the cops to fuck off as he was leaving. EMT's followed him out and he left on a stretched after arguing with him for a few minutes. The cops said "he's gone now, call us when he comes back". Not "if" but "when". Sure enough, dude was caught sleeping there again a week later by a neighbor. This time sober, but belligerent. "I'm just charging my fucking phone! Leave me alone!" was his excuse.
So the Manager called the cops again.. Rinse... Repeat. Happened again with different person this week.
We tried the whole "Hey, come back during the day with the Manager's permission" thing or "Hey you want some food, we have plenty. Sooner or later it was like that book "If you give a mouse a cookie". They steal clothes from the laundry room and try to knock on people's doors to get cigarettes. Not food. Fucking. Cigarettes.
On the flipside, a year ago we had a lady and her old, disabled dad just wandering the streets at 1 Am in front of our apartment. We asked them if they were OK and she had explained that her dad's medical bills made them homeless, She explained that they were just trying to get through the night without being attacked by other homeless dude. So my neighbors rallied together and gave them about 2 weeks worth of food and supplies. We all paid for a hotel room for a week to help them get some relief. Her dad passed away a few weeks later, but she was grateful for it as he was suffering. We gave her some resources on how to get some help locally. Haven't heard back from her after that.... Hope she's doing alright.
What a clusterfuck this whole thing is.
Most unhoused are mentally ill they are not junkies who do not want help.
With truly unused land you may have a point. Problem is nobody wants to camp in BFE.
Homeless camps in public parks is a real tragedy of the commons.
What's more important: a place to live or a recreation area?
Our unhoused neighbors have no choice but to live in a public space because society has denied them any private space to live.
People in need using the commons for their needs isn't a tragedy. It's the reason commons exist.
The tragedy is that shelter isn't considered a human right.
In my view it's not about accessing the recreation area - I'd rather that space be used temporarily for occupancy while we fix up society. Having said that, ad-hoc homeless camps have very real safety risks associated with them. Often crime rates near these camps rise, and it's reasonable for residents to also want to feel safe in their neighborhoods.
What we need is funding for real shelters with real long-term addiction and crisis counseling support. Blindly saying "any and all public spaces should be fair use for homeless camps" is not helpful to anyone.
Oh boy. You go spend a night in a homeless shelter. Seriously. Then say that.
Its a bit silly to say crime rates around these camps go up, as they usually are illegal to begin with. Like marijuana, criminalizing otherwise benign things still brings other criminal elements.
Break-ins, assaults, rape, robbery. You know. Benign things. Also shit and needles everywhere.
So the obvious solution is create conditions for rampant desperation, criminalize despair, shove undeserved out of sight. The etymology of “bedlam,” comes to mind.
There are many better solutions than "let them camp".
Obviously; but the only ones being implemented on a wide basis in the US OS that, and what I said.
Those would be the other criminal elements. Drug dealers have had these issues too.
They probably need services too, then.
It's important that people don't feel threatened just to move in the public spaces. That includes homeless and those with homes.
Thank you because I’m thinking the world is abundant, there is enough to provide more than the basics for everyone, but some humans are insatiable.
Youtuber i seen with a trend of stealth camping in urban locations, had a video of camping overnight in the middle of a roundabout with a lot of shrubbery. And it had kind of a survival horror feel with cops patrolling around, and i remembered...this guy existing in a public space at night shouldnt be this terrifying or feel so taboo.
In general you're correct but camping in a roundabout should be terrifying. You never know if the next person to come along has never been in a roundabout, is raging at anything, is under the influence, or whatever else and might just go plowing through the middle of the thing.
Yep I would never, just because the signs on the roundabouts near where I live are always in bad shape, so people must be hitting them somehow. Not like roundabouts are an unknown thing around here either, drivers are just notably worse here than other places (ik the bar is usually low, but it's even worse than that)
Guessing this was Steve Wallis? He can be a bit paranoid (sometimes for good reason) but he's one of the best on youtube https://youtu.be/OPDvLaXuSHQ
That guy is simply the nicest person
When I learnt what happened last year I was so so sad for him
I saw that video
I basically agree but with a caveat: the majority of people would rather noone is camped in parks. More importantly, people needing to camp in parks is indicative of a far greater problem. I think it's imperative to address the root if we have a hope of effectively combatting homelessness.
You don't need to be an empathetic holistic person to get behind free housing for the homeIess. If you're a truly selfish and purely economically oriented person, then you have to admit giving the homless free homes is economically the best solution for all involved. Alternatives include the taxpayer eating the cost of all the damage they do seeking shelter and survival, or paying a ton of money to police to violently deal with them.
If you prefer those to giving them housing, you're choosing options that are more cruel and more costly -- I don't understand how that makes sense and yet plenty of people seem to choose that.
Because many people perceive homelessness as a proxy for moral failings (such as drug abuse) worthy of punishment.
Of course this is rarely the full picture or even true at all, but we need to get people to understand that this is not a problem that can be solved by punishing people.
Totally agree, just frustrating to try to communicate with people who say they are pro-business and rational, and then they vehemently make emotional moral/spiritual arguments.
I'm fine with this in theory, but in practice the homeless/unhoused don't care whether the property is private or not. I have witnessed them trying to set up tents in people's yards multiple times. Not even big yards, we are talking condo yards.
Occupied condos or vacant condos?
"Private" property that's left vacant is a crime against the right to shelter, and as far as I'm concerned it should be open to squatting.
Squatting in the backyard of an occupied house when there's thousands of vacant houses in every city in America? That's not an action I would agree with, and that's also not what the average unhoused person would do, if for no other reason then because it's much riskier for them than squatting in a public space or a vacant house.
There's no epidemic of entitled dangerous homeless people setting up camp in innocent families' yards. And I certainly wouldn't generalize all homeless people as threats to people's homes.
They are definitely occupied. They aren't trying to claim empty houses, they are literally trying to camp outside people's doors.
Unhoused? That's different from homeless?
It just showed up a year or two ago.
My understanding is that It partly differentiates housing (having a place indoors, a shelter, etc.) from having a home--an apartment, etc. So you could be homeless, living in a shelter, but still not unhoused.
It's also sort of the "in" word.
Either you are homeless or not. You don't need to use another word that means the same thing. It just makes you feel better describing the situation of a person but it doesn't do a damn thing else to help that person.
I agree with the general sentiment that people without a permanent shelter need more action than we as a society currently give them. I also agree that the general trend of using new terms for known issues often confuses the conversation and is of negative value.
However in this one case I think the term "unhoused" is germane to this post. OP posted about public spaces, and included a picture of tents. The people OP directly refers to are unhoused, which is a specific subset of homeless.
If we somehow had shelters or other short term housing for everyone sleeping rough we would have alleviated the unhoused (which is what most people complain about), while not changing the homeless situation.
For a "Solar punk" instance, this community seems to have very little of the "punk" aspect, and in these comments it sounds more like a "Solar rich liberal" place.
The amount of slander towards homeless people, the propagating of stereotypes, and the removal of personhood in these comments really blows my mind. There are even people defending that homeless people should be sent to prison and have their life managed for them; others claim how it's their own fault they are homeless; some cry about "private property".
And of course a bunch of people claiming this isn't a final/permanent solution, and so it shouldn't be done... as if to say, until we come up with better solutions, these people should just go without shelter. What is really a priority to them, is not having to look at homeless people.
In a nutshell: "It's their own fault! They're probably all heroin addicts anyway. Someone else should come up with and implement better solutions, but in the meantime I don't want to have to see and walk by people who don't have a home!". A Solar
PunkNeolib community.When a post gets enough points, it does the Lemmy equivalent of "hitting the front page" and comment character becomes indistinguishable from a brigade. Most of the people commenting on this post aren't from the Slrpnk.net instance. Check out the locals who are though -- excellent people every one -- @[email protected], @[email protected], @[email protected], @[email protected]. These people are making this instance great.
Also, a shout out to the the nice people from other instances - I see you, and you are awesome: @[email protected], @[email protected], @[email protected], @[email protected], @[email protected], @[email protected], @[email protected] - thanks for contributing.
Thank you for taking the time to make some personal acknowledgements, especially for those who are visiting from other instances.
You deserve one yourself too. Your contributions here help make this place great as well.
One good thing about Lemmy still being a relatively small community (at least compared to major social media platforms) is you can actually recognise people and get to know each other. Sort of like old-school forums
I feel that, and I'm trying to be better about that here than I was on reddit. But...reddit had me used to not caring about usernames at all and it's a hard habit to break.
There's definitely a number of people here on Lemmy tho that I get excited about when I see them post or comment. And I'm trying to be better about recognizing the rest of the wonderful folks here too.
Yeah same for me I wouldn't really look at usernames much on reddit because I wouldn't recognise them unless they were "famous" accounts like the poem guy or whatever. Here I definitely do see the same names pop up often which is nice. It's something I missed a lot when going from late 00s/ early 10s forums to reddit.
Of course, you're probably right. It just really irked to look through these comments, and I had to get that out.
There are indeed some comments here that had my cursor hover over the moderation button, but since this was posted on the /c/memes community that has by its nature a more diverse set of subscribers and is meant to reach people that are not already "coverts" anyway, I refrained from doing so mostly. And of course @[email protected] is totally correct that this post was "front-paged" which usually doesn't help with the discussion quality.
In the end, I think this thread had some worthwhile discussions, and maybe made a few people reconsider their hateful stance on homeless people.
It was absolutely heartbreaking to wake up and see a deluge of comments like what you described above... But please don't throw blame on our instance for that. The vast majority of the comments are from outside this instance.
And I'll accept responsibility too for having posted something "controversial" in a c/ that's lacking active moderation.
^(empathy^ ^shouldn't^ ^be^ ^so^ ^fucking^ ^controversial)^
Yes, it's gross. And it's always something like, "oh I think everyone should have a home, but..."
I also don't think people realize how much more space efficient tent cities are. If they buy a giant ass suburban that has a driveway half the size of the house and backyard of perfectly manicured grass that no one walks on it brings house prices up. If do actually want them to start getting off the street try your best to support them and be a good person. If not leave them the fuck alone and atleast don't make their lives more difficult than it already is.
Also some unhoused people do not want to be "in the system" so a tent city gives them a place to be while honoring the desire to not be tracked like that.
Tent cities are a public safety hazard. Needles, fires, weapons, toxic chemicals, shit everywhere, violence, etc. There are good reasons for cities not wanting them on city/public property.
Sure, some people are homeless. If they take care of their tent and the space around it to keep it safe, the rest of society won't have a fit when they and their closest hundred buddies move into a local community park.
I do agree there they are a fire hazard and have to be regulated but there are ways to mitigate that like gun control, installing porta-potties or public bathroom near tents, making sure tents are well spaced out, etc... People have to go somewhere and if they can't afford housing and you simply disband their settlement they will move somewhere and become someone elses problem. This does not solve the issue. Helping them does and so does making denser housing to bring down house prices.
"We make the community by defending it: Calling police on people that don’t have a house is a violent act to those seeking shelter in the community they belong to."
https://slrpnk.net/post/2172321
This is like me being able to choose not to pay taxes for public areas I don't use.
I prefer we consider Michael Moore's proposal from "The Big One". He posited that we have all these empty spaces in wealthier communities in the form of golf courses. He suggested we convert those lands into public housing as they would not only have open space to build on but because the wealthier communities can absorb the schooling costs more easily.
Rich would leave and go elsewhere in 5 years
So the city is degentrified as well, that's two birds with one stone
It was never a city nor was it gentrified in the first place since it had golf courses
There are public and private golf courses in many cities.
Well okay, but I don't see what having golf courses has to do with somewhere being gentrified or not lol.
1 year
They've already bought two other mansions to wash away the thought-taste of poor people existing
Then surely those same people are working to destigmatize it and provide help right?
Right?
Your compassionate solution to homelessness is to lock them all up in... "prison lite"
yeah, okay lmao
It should be illegal to be homeless.
They should forcibly be provided shelter, protection, food, treatment, and skills until they are ready to live on their own. Of course they should be free to leave the facility each day, but if found camping out should be brought back.
At the same time very affordable, very durable housing should be provided for them to graduate out to.
If you would have ever talked to a homeless person, you would know this isn't a real solution.
For example there is very little chance such a camp would be set up anyway near a place where a homeless person could try to work themselves out of the bad situation they are in, which nearly all of them want to do. Usually they could find some place very remote themselves to live, but there is no chance to ever get out of the situation themselves then.
Any attempt to solve this needs to make sure these people are not robbed of their own agency and treated like some non-person that needs to be "managed" somehow. Just try to imaging yourself in such a situation and you will hopefully agree.
I've worked as an EMT for over a decade and prior to that experienced homelessness myself.
It is very rare these folks can help themselves, and need positive forces in their lives.
In our current society it isn't really a solution, but must become so. Homelessness is an epidemic and society must make drastic efforts to change.
Sure, they often objectively can't (without help), but usually they find themselves in a self-reinforcing downward spiral and taking away their agency makes it much worse.
Like I said, they are free to come and go, just not be homeless in public. They, I'm this idealized plan of mine would be receiving great things, from medical help to education, safety and more.
Trade off is you can't camp out a city park any more.
Sounds like your answer is to just continue to criminalize homelessness... the opposite of this post's intent.
How's that been working out currently?
Mate, the biggest criminals I’ve ever seen wore a suit and a tie, and we’re not doing anything about them.
Sanctuary incoming
Can I ask where the image is from? It would make a great sticker.
I found it on mastodon somewhere not too long ago..
I'm so sick of people talking about needles whenever homeless people come up. It's slander, plain and simple.
I used to live in Seattle directly next door to a homeless encampment. I used to walk by it every single day for 2 years. I have never ONCE seen a needle on the ground, day or night. You know what I did see a bunch of? People claiming that there were needles everywhere, without a shred of evidence.
This is one of those things that's gonna vary greatly based on location. Your experience doesn't change that other people may be experiencing something different
Worth noting needles found in camps do not always belong to unhoused people there.
From first-hand experience, Vancouver downtown Eastside does have needles everywhere. Then again, nobody really walks through downtown Eastside, so I guess it's fine.
Uhhh...great? I'm happy you had a good experience? But the data and programs over the last few years disagree with your assertion here.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/more-than-32000-syringes-collected-in-pilot-needle-program/ (note why it was started)
https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/citizens-group-that-cleans-up-used-drug-needles-is-fed-up-problem-grows/FSEEUYCOWBH63DDXPDLMLYGI2I/
https://mynorthwest.com/2361336/seattle-ramps-up-efforts-clean-litter-needles-graffiti/
Are all homeless folks users that leave needles lying around? Statistically, no, of course not. Is it a likely correlation? The data is above for you to draw your own conclusions.
The people by you might not be IV drug users and the people leaving needles around aren't necessarily homeless. Almost all of the opiate addicts I know are or were housed but the IV users would still use in public.
Those needles found in camps could belong to housed people who used near the camp or in the camp and do not live there.
Also worth mentioning unhoused people are not necessarily drug users. I know a lot of sober Iraq vets on the streets of NYC.
Honestly some of these comments really dont fit to the solar punk ideals and should get removed.
Especially because land squatting, building low tech communes and working together on problems is what happens in many of those camps and thats just so solar punk to me.
I don't really think injecting fentanyl in a tent on the sidewalk should be classed as 'building a low tech commune'
So you're in favour of safe injection sites, yes?
Yeah sure to a certain extent but I fail to see how drug addicts whose prime concern is to bump just a tad below the lethal dose are somehow building a techpunk utopia bottom up
In our tech punk utopia even the most troubled have some form of shelter? We need something better but if it stops people from dying on the street I'm for it.
If they're dying somewhere else it'd just hide the problem from the public
Nope nope nope nope nope. How do you know what communities and organizations the people in the tents belong to? Or how they've organized their network of tents and mutual aid, what relationships they have with nearby homeowners and business owners, how they gather and share resources and make decisions?
Squatters and the unhoused routinely, out of necessity, form partnerships and communities with other unhoused and insufficiently housed people. We'd call those communities "communes" if they were made of rich white people owning homes. And yeah, people in those communities use drugs just like people who own houses do.
Thinking more deeply about it, I think you've identified by example one of the many ways neoliberal ideology encourages discrimination against unhoused people. Neoliberalism teaches us that every unhoused person is an individual whose individual choices are to blame for his low social and economic status. So we assume unhoused people are alone, that they don't belong to communities, that they have no family or social support, that they don't have a network of mutual aid - even though, when someone is unhoused, having networks of mutual aid are even more important than they are for people with secure housing. And that lets us dismiss the unhoused as people without social connections who only care about their personal self interest.
But no, that dude in the tent shooting up fent probably is part of a commune. He meets with other unhoused people to pool money and buy food or take advantage of free meals at the local gurdwara or use a gym membership to take a shower. He advises newly homeless people, he seeks advice from elders in the community, he hangs out outside his tent or at a local meeting spot and chats with other community members. He's part of a network of mutual aid that shares intellectual and social and financial resources to help each other in their disadvantaged circumstances. And if he's not in a network of mutual aid which fits the definition of a commune, it's not because he can't be, but because he chooses not to be.
Unhoused people are not animals. They are humans. That means they communicate with other humans. And that means the unhoused form the same networks of politics and society and economics and mutual aid as everyone else.
Well I could reply to your wall point by point but I guess this is the major one we'd stay in disagreement on
Have you ever done fentanyl?
Now see, what you've done there is called a fallacy, and what that means is that your argument is not very good. Try again! I'm sure you'll get 'em next time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoting_out_of_context
I am not denying drug use /abuse, but maybe stop bringing up your regional fentanyl problem which is not relevant in many parts of the world.
This post is not about many parts of the world
I agree, but is it a meme?
Yes, memes are viral thoughts, often utilizing fun to spread, but not necessarily so.
It baffles me that anybody today would say memes aren't or shouldn't be political. I think politics and ideology are the primary reason people create and share memes today. The funny animal cheeseburger phase of meme culture is long over. As witness Reddit meming Trump into office and all the racist conservative memes your boomer relatives share.
I don't think it's a meme but not because of politics.
I think someone else would have to put their own twist on it for it to really count to me.
Otherwise literally everything anyone posts ever is a meme.
That's how Dawkins originally intended it, interestingly. It's been completely redefined in popular parlance, but a meme is originally any transmissable unit of information between minds.
And Blackmore!
Fair enough
Love the message but still not sure it's really a meme on the truest sense. But no one seems to care about that here anyway.
Public spaces typically have intended uses. When those spaces aren't used for what they are intended, something needs to change. When the homeless set up 1000 survival spaces in a public park... the rest of us should suffer because of their bad decisions/luck? Use your energy to make a difference instead of an ineffectual post. Vote in better policy makers.
I would be cool with chill people setting up tents for a day or two or at night or whatever. But who's going to be picking the used heroin needles up out of the grass and wrangling the drug dealers and gang members when they start showing up? The reason peole don't want tent villages is this, not because they simply hate the "unhoused".
Making some pretty out there assumptions about the kind of people who are homeless, my dude...
Don't pretend like you've ever seen a needle on the ground. People that say stuff like that are too scared to even walk near a homeless camp, let alone look at the ground while you do so.
There are literally homeless tent villages along the city bike/river trail I use multiple times per week. I ride by homeless people walking along, riding along, and camping a foot off the trail on a regular basis. Some of them have dogs which inevitably are off their leash, and they chase and try to attack me. I literally said I was okay with homeless people, but not the trouble that inevitably follows. And yes, I have seen needles on the ground, so stop making things up to feel like you've made a point lol. They also leave trash everywhere, turned over carts full of their belongings, and random clothes strewn about the grass. Some of them drive their cars along the bike path to get to the homeless village. There are people who obviously are gang bangers who go back into the woods too. It's silly.